Acer Travelmate Drops Power

Okay, this is my first problem with this Acer laptop. I am not sure when I bought it, but I would say it is at least  4 years old, maybe a year or two older.

Needless to say this is a most anoying problem, and it is so annoying I have switched to my Acer 5100 laptop running Windows 7 for the time being. Annoying I say, so I posted my issue at annoyances.org:


"You posted the following message to the Windows XP Annoyances Discussion Forum:
http://www.annoyances.org/exec/forum/winxp/1305889163

My Acer Travelmate 4220 laptop lately has started doing something most annoying.
It simply loses power and goes silent. I can't even restart it by powering on - the
power button is not functioning. It will start up after a rest period - not sure
how long it needs.

I just thought I'd ask for a few quick responses to this as to what might be the
cause. It's about 4 years old. I'm guessing it's an overheating problem, but not
sure. When I say "drops power", I mean instantaneously. I could be in the middle
of typing something or could be out of the room. It's unpredictable.

When I do power it back on, my wireless switch has been turned off and I have to
turn it on again every time this happens.

Needless to say I can not rely on this machine.

Thoughts?

Thank you,

Tom"

Windows scareware fakes impending drive disaster

Just another rogue program, but sometimes we need reminders to be careful of our choices. These folks are really bold, I might add, asking $80 for a copy of their worthless product!

This comes from computerworld.com.

"Scammers are trying to trick Windows users into paying to fix bogus hard drive errors that have apparently erased important files, a researcher said today.

The con is a variant of "scareware," also called "rogueware," software that pretends to be legitimate but actually is just a sales pitch based on spooking users into panicking. Most scareware masquerades as antivirus software."

More here.......